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This paper explores the feminine in the Aeneid, with particular attention to the patterns, often dissonant, arising from the interaction of gender with social class, the latter broadly conceived. Many of the most influential studies of the feminine in the epic have focused considerable attention on those at the top of the tree, especially the divine females whose status as women is assumed in ways that perhaps gloss over the differential structures of power in the representation of women in the poem. In so doing, such studies partake in a multifaceted problem in feminist criticism (and indeed activism): How to focus on the female without reification of femininity into a single form, while nonetheless enabling both solidarity between women of different status, and critical awareness of the injustices suffered by certain groups of women and not others (sometimes at the hands of other individual women or groups of women). I shall attempt to redress the balance by drawing out the specificity of different women’s characters and lives, including especially those at the bottom of the social spectrum in the hierarchical and aristocratic world of epic. This will involve deliberately seeking out some of those at the bottom of the heap, including the nurses and slaves, but also Anna soror, and even the minor goddesses Juturna and Deiopea. I aim to read for difference, for individuality, but in such a way as also to build up a picture of a female world that both engages in and opposes the masculine world of epic and politics. Despite my title, I shall pay only limited attention to major players in the poem, only insofar as they serve to shed light on the minor characters who are my main focus. As a result, there is almost nothing of Dido in this article, or even Lavinia and Camilla.

At the end of the extended account of Phaethon’s disastrous celestial journey (Met. 1.750–2.400), the hapless charioteer’s family and friends give way to wildly expressive grief. Phaethon’s father, the Sun, refuses to shine (2.329–32); his mother, Clymene, wanders over the world looking for his scattered bones until she finds his tomb (made by some helpful nymphs, 2.325–8) at which to mourn ...

Ovid often displays a remarkable attention to the psychology of female actors, but the question is to what extent this attention can be regarded as truly sympathetic and empathetic, and to what extent it is objectifying. Rather than treating this question in one or a few passages, this chapter approaches the problem systematically. The chapter explores the rules which seem to apply to gender through transformation, including those instances that are actually metamorphosis of gender. Thus, not only a well-known example like Teiresias but a number of others are summoned to detail how Ovid does in a variety of ways sensitively represent female subjectivity—but only in negative contexts. Metamorphosis of gender goes almost exclusively in one direction. The chapter suggests the possibility of holding in tension both sympathy and objectification, arguing that there is a disproportionate emphasis on women’s (as opposed to men’s) experience of metamorphosis and that this is combined with the power relations which make certain kinds of metamorphosis a negatively feminizing process.

Intratextuality is a critical term used to explore the relationship between the parts and the whole in texts, including issues of unity (and disunity), the relationship between digressions and their surroundings, interactions between disparate parts of texts (such as ring composition), juxtapositions that may reflect surprisingly on their neighbours, or any structural issue within a single work of literature. Intratextual approaches may also be interested in ways in which the activity of a reader affects response to the text, for example by dividing it into mental “paragraphs.” Crucial to intratextual reading is that all these relationships be interpretable.

Ulrike Auhagen: Die Hetäre in der griechischen und römischen Komödie. München: C. H. Beck 2009. VII, 336 S. (Zetemata. 135.)

McAuslan, Ian and Walcot, Peter (eds) Women in Antiquity Archer, Leonie J., Fischler, Susan and Wyke, Maria (eds) Women in Ancient Societies: ‘An Illusion of the Night’ Hawley, Richard and Levick, Barbara (eds) Women in Antiquity: New Assessments Richlin, Amy (ed.) Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome Sorkin Rabinowitz, Nancy and Richlin, Amy (eds) Feminist Theory and the Classics Reeder, Ellen D. Pandora: Women in Classical Greece

CONTENTS PREFACE INTRODUCTION 1. Piety, labour, and justice in Lucretius and Hesiod 2. The political epistemology of infinity 3. Lucretius, Epicurus, and the Logic of Multiple Explanations 4. Nature, spontaneity, and voluntary action in Lucretius 5. Seeing and unseeing, seen and unseen 6. The poetic logic of negative exceptionalism in Lucretius, book five 7. Lucretius and the Epicurean attitude toward grief 8. Nil igitur mors est ad nosa Iphianassa, the Athenian plague, and Epicurean views of death 9. Lucretius and Ovid on Empedoclean cows and sheep 10. (First-)Beginnings and (never-)endings in Lucan and Lucretius BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

Reading is delusion. In order to read, we have to suspend certain standards of reality and accept others; we have to offer ourselves to deceit, even if it is an act of deception of which we are acutely aware. One way of considering this paradoxical duality in the act of reading (being deceived while being aware of the deception) is more or less consciously to posit multiple levels of reading, whereby the deceived reader is watched by an aware reader, who is in turn watched by a super-reader; and so it continues. The ancient art critics, obsessed as they were with deceptive realism, provide in anecdotal form a good example of such multiplicity of perception when they tell stories of birds trying to peck at painted grapes, horses trying to mate with painted horses, even humans deceived by the lifelikeness of works of art. Such stories act as easy but potent signifiers of ‘realism’ in ancient art criticism, by showing the reactions of a ‘naive reader’ (the animals) whose deception the aware reader can enter into but also see exposed. In verbal or visual art parading itself as realistic, the artistic pretence of a pose of reality is, at some level, intended to be seen as deceptive; when it is non-realistic, or anti-realistic, or even stubbornly abstract (which it rarely is), art still demands that the reader suspend ordinary perception. But deception alone is not enough: ‘deceit’ only becomes artistic when a viewer sees through it, for a work of art which is so lifelike thatno-onerealizes it is not real has not entered the realm of art. The appreciation of deception happens at the moment when the deception is undone, or by the imaginative creation of a less sophisticated reader who has not seen through the deceit. That is what happens in comedy, more overtly than in other artforms, but in the same way.

Below art, we find artifice, and it is this zone of artifice, midway between nature and art, that we are now about to enter. (Bergson 1913: 66) Bergson's tempting twilight zone where artifice rules is the domain of comedy. Comedy is an art form which delights in its artificiality, glories in its artifice, and actualises its art – all with apparently effortless ease and studied avoidance of obvious studiousness. This study concerns the particular form of comedy which flourished as a performance genre in the late third and early–mid second centuries bc , the plays being first produced as part of festivals celebrating one of the gods, or on other religious, social, and political occasions, such as the dedication of a temple or funeral games for a great man like Lucius Aemilius Paullus. The audience was on holiday and expecting a play to match, but it was also, at least in part, a sophisticated theatre-going crowd with experience of different types of dramatic performance and of other forms of art. The plays of Plautus and Terence flourished also as a textual genre which manifested itself in a much wider range of reading practices, including the scholarship of Varro, the rhetoric of Cicero, the epitomisation of the grammarians and moralisers, the exemplification of the schoolroom, and the imitation of the Western comic tradition.

On 5th February 1989, the review section ofThe Observercarried a full-page article on a film about Camille Claudel, the sculptress who was Rodin's mistress and who spent the last thirty years of her life in a mental asylum. The iconography of this page, supposedly concerned with the film and the woman, was telling. A large central image of Rodin, arms crossed and staring masterfully forward, is ringed by three, small, peripheral images of Claudel. Each is (of course) a photograph: one of the woman herself, one of the statue of her by her lover Rodin, and one of the actress who represents her in the film. The images display the slippage between women and artistic representations or creations (of women)—a slippage which is at the heart of the Pygmalion story. The title of the article isLove that turned to stone.InMetamorphoses10.148-739, Ovid has the master-poet, Orpheus, react to the double loss of his wife, Eurydice, by singing to surrounding nature a set of tales, including that of Pygmalion (245-97). Pygmalion, it will be remembered, created a beautiful statue, with which he fell in love. With the help of Venus and in response to the artist's erotic attentions, the statue came to life.

This chapter highlights the way Lucretius's poem, De Rerum Natura, has become part of science's investigation of its own genealogy. It analyses the tropes of personification and abstraction and their gendering in scientific discourse and asks why Lucretius's scientific manifesto is framed by accounts of female mythical characters. De Rerum Natura is read positively in the present day precisely because of the contemporary high valuation of science and also the contemporary interrogation and deconstruction of scientific discourse. One element in Lucretius's representation of gender is that ‘female myth undermines male science’, that in the interstices of this scientific ‘male’ text there is evidence of alternative points of view that might reasonably be categorised as ‘feminine’. An underlying tension that has pervaded so much of Lucretian study is between ‘poetry’ and ‘philosophy’. It seems impossible for the philosopher to take up the subject-position of the mother cow (the representative of the poet = female side).

This chapter rethinks the relationship between ‘digression’ and ‘main text’ in didactic poetry. By looking at both the narrative ‘digressions’ and the ‘action’ of central characters implicit in the instructional parts of the text, it is argued that both parts can be seen to work together, rather than in opposition, in the creation of an ‘implied narrative’. It might even be argued that it is the instructional parts which are obstructive, in that they slow down the instructional momentum of the ‘digressional’ stories.

This collection of essays on Ovid's corpus of erotodidactic poetry from an international contingent of Ovidian scholars finds its origins in a major conference held at the University of Manchester in 2002. The contributors between them offer a series of perspectives on the issues that have dominated scholarship on the poems in recent decades: questions of genre, intertextuality, narratology, and reception; the socio-historical Augustan context for the poems; and the nature of ‘love’ as it is constructed in the poems. Moreover, the introduction provides a comprehensive history of scholarship on the poems in the last fifty years, in which the current papers are situated. As the first collection of critical essays on Ovid's erotodidactic poetry to appear in English, one final aim of the present volume (and its original conference) is to bring together the important cultural or national traditions – German, Italian, Anglophone (British, Irish, and American) – of scholarship on the Ars and Remedia that have so far existed largely in isolation.